formerly JUSTINE'S LAIR OF PULP PULCHRITUDE & BADASS MAMAS
(Where we take delight on the corruption of the innocent)

Saturday, June 10, 2017

The Erotic Thriller: Bodies in Motion - First Brief Notes

CRUISING
(1980)

There may have been others
before. PLAY MISTY FOR ME (1971)
comes naturally to mind. But it was in the early to mid-Eighties of the
20th Century that (sub)urban males got to explore the late-night urban
fantasyland, a seedy neon-lit world of night-clubs, strip-clubs, whorehouses,
femme fatales, sex, crime and violence. More precisely, in 1980, fresh out from
a series of successes in such films as THE
GODFATHER (1972), GODFATHER II
(1974), SERPICO (1973) and A DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1976) Al Pacino
played an undercover cop hunting for a killer that was staking the homosexual underworld
as his killing ground in William Friedkin’s CRUISING. The film was based in real life police officer Randy
Jurgensen (who plays detective Lefransky in the film) who, in the early sixties,
had gone undercover into the homosexual community in order to (successfully)
capture a similar killer. Friedkin’s hypnotic update of the story into the
Eighties presented a fascinating world of leather and neon, dress and sex
codes, and tremendous sexual ambiguity that converted the night into an
alluring new frontier to be explored by a generation of bored middle-class men,
bound to routine by the shackles of their well-paid rat racing, mortgages,
marriage and children.

Soon several of those men
were looking for an excuse to cruise the empty streets of the neon-night-world
in films such as BEDROOM EYES
(1984), AFTER HOURS (1985) or INTO THE NIGHT (1985), there to find a
roller-coaster ride of danger, adventure, and, sometimes, even horror; but also
sex with sultry vampire-like women or modern-day femme-fatales, who combined in
their sensuality both the erotic and the terrifying. In those initiation trips,
white middle-class men were confronted with the staleness of the American
Dream. Conformity and boredom were the price to pay for financial security,
upward class mobility and freedom from venereal disease. The candy-colored suburban
dream was lacking in the excitement that only the marginally dangerous, the
dark underside of the dream, could provide. And provide it did, in spades.

Linda
Fiorentino in AFTER HOURS (1985)

Suddenly, barbecue-loving
wannabe-Kens were leaving their imagined-to-be Barbie wives in search of the
dark, risky pleasures promised by nipple-pierced punk nymphets of the likes of
Linda Fiorentino’s character in Scorsese’s magnificent AFTER HOURS. However, it soon became clear that, sometimes, the
darkness would follow you in. And it did in the shape of FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)’s über-psycho-bitch Glenn Close. Delighted
with the illicit pleasures of extra-conjugal bliss, this recently freed man
cannot imagine that this new amazing world he has just discovered can harbor
among its denizens someone who might aspire to the shackles of suburban
conformity. The collision of two separate worlds, much as in George Costanza’s
famous dictum, dictate the annihilation of this new “independent man” and
threatens to collapse the very distinct life-lines of safe family environment
by day, and exciting thrill-seeking by night. Those two spheres had to remain
separate in order to avoid all risks of contamination. To avoid that night-side
inhabitants (like FATAL ATTRACTION’s
Close) should cross the dark mirror to the sunny side. When that happens,
amidst the violence and familial and personal mayhem of Adrian Lyne’s opus, the
middle-class trespasser in the land of dreams goes back to his shell.

Worlds colide in Adrian Lyne’s FATAL ATTRACTION (1987)

The newly-free man of the
Eighties retrenches in suburbia and becomes the c.u.n.t. (caring uninteresting nineties type) that Nicholas Royle
so appropriately christened. The thrill of the adventure is substituted by the
fear of getting caught. Risk taking is not an option anymore. He has to go back
to his old comfortable ways. More than that, he even fights back – the same
Michael Douglas that pisses out of the pan in FATAL ATTRACTION, is then played as a patsy in Paul Verhoeven’s BASIC INSTINCT (1992) and finally
turned into a cry-baby that is ‘raped’ by hot-boss Demi Moore in Barry
Levinson’s DISCLOSURE (1994).

With men thus dully
chastised, it was then time for women to explore the dark new world with which
they had had a first brush by their husbands’ tribulations. After all, it was
to be expected that the same dangerous thrills that so enthralled their men
would also have a mysterious allure for them. Women would then embark in the
same initiation voyage, through the dark labyrinth of sensual danger to the
ultimate goal of personal enlightenment and sexual fulfillment. Perhaps not
surprisingly, that trip would closely mimic that of their male counterparts. It
is thus absolutely natural that said journey should also begin on the same professional
realm, with a police woman going undercover to the seedy world of strip-clubs
to hunt down a killer that’s been preying on strippers.

VIEWER BEWARE

The content of this blog may be offensive for non-mature readers, feminists, school-teachers, PoMo pseudo-thinkers and whomever may believe smut can't be a relevant art form. Some of the images displayed therein may arouse this blog's reader's libido and prompt younger viewers to seek the joys of the opposite sex.